Traces of retribution immediately executed, which fulfilled the sentence of the order as infallibly as though it were the arm of fate itself, are, perhaps, likewise to be found in the proceedings of the Vehme, or secret tribunal, although its existence only commenced two hundred years after the extermination of the order of murderers in Asia.[298] The insanity of the enlighteners, who thought that by mere preaching, they could emancipate nations from the protecting care of princes, and the leading-strings of practical religion, has shown itself in the most terrible manner by the effects of the French revolution, as it did in Asia, in the reign of Hassan II; and as, at that period, the doctrine of assassination and treason openly proceeded from Alamut, so did the doctrine of regicide produce from the French National Convention, in Jean de Brie, a legion of regicides. The members of the Convention who sat with Robespierre on the side of the mountain, and who decreed the king’s execution, would have been satellites worthy of the Old Man of the Mountain. Like the initiated to murder, they almost all died a violent death. The dominion of the Assassins sank under the iron tramp of Hulaku; their fall drew after it that of the ancient throne of the khalif, and of other dynasties; thousands bled under the conquering sword of the Mongols, who went forth as the scourge of Heaven—like Attila and Jengis Khan, to steel with blood the deadened nerves of nations. After him, the remains of the hydra of Assassination quivered in the remnant of the sect of the Ismailites, but powerless and venomless; held down by the preponderance of the government in Persia and Syria; politically harmless, somewhat like the juggling of the Templars of the present day, and other secret societies watched by the vigilant eye of the police in France.